Of course, the design challenges of a) housing b) fluid conservation, reclamation, and compression/condensation and c) minimizing design complexity and fluid usage for cost reduction are not trivial.

I'll be blunt. BFL's prototype power usage has me concerned. To a point where I might make a cloud chamber leveraging phase change and a heat exchanger.

Cooling studies based in CPU have pointed out that a FCBGA package, used by the BFL ASIC, while it radiates heat away from the board better, still the chip itself acts as a heat sink for the remainder of board components. Whatever is going on with BFL's board components, if BFL is making true statements, is causing some serious heat and that heat will follow the path of least resistance. If the chips are the path of least resistance - no bueno.

So, to entirely abandon hopes that BFL's design would properly manage thermal loads of all components on their board I have begun to design a DIY cloud chamber.

The most non trivial part to this is to ensure that the chamber is utterly air tight. The proposition of using Novec means that special precautions for maintenance access, and design of the maintenance hatch, could be tricky.

Anyone interested in keeping an eye on this?

"Bitcoin has been an amazing ride, but the most fascinating part to me is the seemingly universal tendency of libertarians to immediately become authoritarians the very moment they are given any measure of power to silence the dissent of others." - The Bible